Notes from the glen.
What the roads and the light are doing, what is happening in the hills this month, and the history behind the places we drive to. Written weekly, and every fact in it has a source at the foot of the page.
All entries
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Roads and passes
Who grits the road: what changes when you turn off the A82
The trunk roads get a gritting service around the clock until May. The council roads our days turn onto get one from six in the morning to nine at night. Here is where that line falls on Glen Etive and Applecross.
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Wildlife
The Glen Affric pines that were ten years old and three inches tall
In 1948 there were hardly any young Scots pines left in Glen Affric. The seedlings were there all along, bitten to the ground. What a deer fence showed, and why fewer fences is now the aim.
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History
Corrieshalloch’s bridge, and the famine roads either side of it
In 1874 the engineer of the Forth Bridge hung a footbridge across his own gorge so people could look down. The roads you drive to reach it were built a generation earlier, by people working for relief.
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The season
The rut is starting, and you will hear it long before you see it
Red deer stags start roaring in the glens from late September. Here is what is actually audible, where the sound carries best on our routes, and the thing nobody tells visitors about the first three weeks of October.
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Light and timing
Inverness drops below twelve hours of daylight on Friday
The equinox fell in the small hours of this morning, but day and night here are not equal until Friday. What the next three months do to the light, and which of our days still fit inside it.
About these notes
Short, factual, and sourced.
These are not travel-writing. They are the things worth knowing before a day out here — when a pass shuts, how much daylight there actually is in November, what happened at a place you will be standing in. Every claim carries a link to where it came from, and where we do not know something, the note says so.
If you want the practical version first, read what a private Highland day costs and involves — the price, the shape of the hours, and when a coach would serve you better.